Path Photo Sharing Service Launches with Free iPhone App

If you love to share photos with your friends and family but privacy issues keep you fearful of doing so with big services like Facebook, you may have a new choice -- Path has launched their website alongside a free iPhone app that gets the job done, sharing your photos with only the people you want to see them.

TechCrunch is reporting that Path has finally launched after six months of buzz. The new photo sharing service comes courtesy of former Facebook employee Dave Morin (not to mention a number of other alumni from the social giant), with an investors list that includes the likes of Ashton Kutcher -- but don’t let that scare you off, since Path is available as a free iPhone app in addition to the company’s website.

Path takes a different approach to photo sharing, assuming that you don’t want to share your snapshots with just anyone. In fact, you can only share pics with up to 50 of your closest friends and family, making the service far more intimate than what we’ve all gotten used to with services like Facebook.

That’s right, Path puts you in control: “After firing up the app, you’ll be asked to select contacts from your phone’s address book,” TechCrunch explains. “Tap a few, and from then on, those contacts will see your shared photo items in their feed automatically (they don’t have to accept anything, but they can block or temporarily ‘mute’ you if they don’t want to see your content).”

The service also lets you know when friends and family have actually viewed your photos with a feature called “Seen.” That should eliminate those little white lies your distant relatives tell you when you ask them if they’ve seen the new photos of the baby -- you’ll know at a glance if they’re telling the truth or not.

Path also does away with a lot of the noise of services like Facebook, eschewing comments and captioning in favor of tags (at least for now). Once you post a new image, you’ll then be asked to tag it with the people in the photo, the location where it was taken and a “Thing” the photo is associated with -- for example, a particular event you were attending or even one of the items within the photo.

It will be interesting to see how Path finds a home in a “share everything” kind of world, but you can judge for yourself by hitting the App Store and downloading the Path app for yourself, which went live on Monday. It’s currently only compatible with the iPhone and requires iOS 4.0 or later.